Tour D'Amour
by Gunney
Summary: An S&H AU. Set in WWII a highly decorated soldier shows up in the office of an African American captain, wanting to join his ranks. *I am not a historian so there will be plenty of historical mistakes, fair warning.
1. Prologue

"Sergeant Starsky?"

"Yes, sir."

The captain grunted softly and looked at the white boy decked in khaki, looking for all the world like a soldier, except for what the records in his hands said. He looked to the papers then eyed the soldier, looking for a wise-ass smirk at the corner of his lips. Maybe something about his uniform was grossly out of dress, or perhaps he had liquor on his breath. Something had to be wrong with this kid for him to show up outside Captain Dobey's office.

Dobey looked to the sheet. There were medals, most of them pending, and commendation after commendation of heroism under fire. He'd saved more men than the red cross in the area he'd been serving and had been wounded twice. Why then was this man being transferred? And to a colored unit of all places!?

"You understand why you're here?" Dobey asked finally, and waited again for the smirk, or a cough, or something from outside his office to indicate that this was in fact all a big joke. This was really some general's son and he was being taught a lesson, or given a friendly jab.

"I know why they sent me." The man said, and Dobey caught for the first time the East Coast accent.

The kid's sheet said he came from New York. There was at least one scrappy sergeant under his command that also came from New York. Dobey couldn't think of the kid's name off the bat but the men under him called him something cute…Guppy or Fuzzy or...it escaped him at the moment, and Sergeant Starsky was clearly done speaking.

"Have a seat, Sergeant."

"I'd rather stand, sir."

"Sit." Dobey said. And he said it with enough force for it to feel like he was shouting, but his volume hadn't changed. The sparkle he'd been looking for finally glinted in the sergeant's eyes for a millisecond before the sergeant relaxed his stance and settled into a chair.

Dobey sat as well. He was a big man, and while much of it was still muscle, he was also an older man. His youth had come and gone and he held no illusions in that area. Sitting down when he could was the wisest course and Dobey refused to sit while a man stood on the other side of his desk. It was a power trip that he'd had to live through as a black man in a white man's job for far too long, and he'd swore he would never do it to anyone else.

"You served overseas." Dobey began once his bones had settled.

"Yes sir."

"Saved a dozen men in a firefight by…" Dobey pulled the paper closer to his face. "...launching grenades into a machine gun nest with a woman's…" Dobey sighed. "...brazier."

The smirk came and went, but Starsky's face was clearly lighter. Dobey watched him and waited, but Starsky made no attempt to expound on the subject. Dobey read on.

"Here it says you were instrumental in derailing an ammunition train. Despite great losses and while under enemy fire you and another man managed to hijack an enemy tank and drive it head on into the locomotive of a moving train."

Dobey watched blue eyes drift sideways, and he knew suddenly the lost, pensive look that overcame the sergeant. He was reliving that moment, remembering some details so precisely that he could recite them as if describing a moving picture scene. Others would be hazey for the rest of his days.

"What was the name of that other man, Sergeant?"

"Harrison, sir."

"Harrison...and where is Harrison now?"

"Promoted, sir. He's stateside."

"Harrison is promoted and sent stateside for more training and you sit here in my office with transfer papers. Do you mind telling me what exactly happened?"

Startling blue eyes met Dobey's head on and again he was reminded of his own brash sergeant, Humpy...Puffy...he couldn't remember the nickname but the kid always had that look about him. Streetwise, worldwise, wiser than most of the kids his age. He knew something about the game of life that most men didn't learn until they were nearing their forties and wondering where the time had gone.

Starsky was only 25 according to his papers. He should have been chasing girls and driving cars too fast. Not trying to reenlist in the wrong side of the army.

The sergeant finally took in a breath then gritted his teeth softly and said, "My loyalty was questioned, sir."

Dobey blinked. "Loyalty? This is after the brazier and the tank?"

"Yes sir." Starsky mumbled, looking to the razor sharp creases in his pants.

"Son, I have the right to refuse this transfer if I deem it necessary. I can see that you are drummed out of this, and every branch of the service without honor, pension or privileges. Thanks to the way the man runs this army I am low enough on the totem pole that I won't wag as many heads as those white captains would. The only thing keepin' me from doing that right now is your record. At the very bottom of this paper, all I see is two weeks of AWOL, not Benedict Arnold." Dobey paused, watched the cold blue eyes that stayed focused on him the entire time then said, "You want to stay in the fight?"

"I do, sir." Starsky said, without hesitation.

"Then tell me why you changed your mind for two weeks."

Dobey could all but see the gears turning in the kid's head. The army haircut had left him with little on his skull but what was growing back was thick and tightly coiled, growing around a small linear scar that started just above his right eye. The kid might be considered handsome by any girl catching sight of him in uniform yet he had no ring on his finger. For a brief moment Dobey suspected that Starsky's loyalty had less to do with the AXIS powers or the Japanese, and more to do with which team he batted for.

The longer Starsky took to respond to his question the more the thought took hold and stayed.

Then the sergeant caved a little and said simply, "Her name was Louisa."

"Louisa?"

"Yeah. Dark brown hair, green eyes, pouty lips. She could'a been a movie star, or a model, easy."

Dobey felt himself ease a little, and smirked. "She your girl?"

"No. She wasn't my girl. She was never my girl. She never will be my girl." Starsky said, his voice taking on a tone that might have been considered insubordinate. Dobey let it bide for a moment, and waited.

"She was Italian. Loyal to Italy. She loved a man who was stationed at one of the POW camps there. He loved her. I met her in a USO club in England. She'd been sent there by her parents the night before their town was overrun by the German army. She was staying with cousins. But she wanted to go back to Italy. She loved the guy. She-"

Starsky cut himself off and Dobey caught the weight of the emotion that had suddenly slammed into the floodgate Starsky had put up.

"I happened to be with the company that liberated this particular camp." The sergeant began again, rushing through it now. "I recognized the guy's name. I gave him Louisa's picture like she'd asked me to. I told him she was in England, waitin' for him. That was it."

"That's it?"

The sergeant gave a shrug that was blatant insubordination without question, but Dobey saw it as a casual admittance of guilt. There were finite details to the situation that he maybe hadn't shared, with anyone, before that moment, and they were likely to remain hidden. And that had apparently been fine for the army officials that had, up until that moment, only cared about passing the buck.

A buck showed up on Dobey's desk and his tendency was to snap it up, take a good long look at it, and then decide what he was going to do with it. Passing it along was a waste of resources. Dobey sat and watched the soldier. He let the quiet linger and waited for the first sign of discomfort. It came, but not as a reflection of nervousness so much as impatience. The soldier's knee started to vibrate, an up-down motion that was so rapid it caused the pen stand on Dobey's desk to start squeaking in parallel rhythm. Starsky looked at the pen stand, stopped his knee, recognized the connection and forced himself to remain still.

"What will you do if I turn down your application?"

In answer the sergeant got to his feet, snapped a salute, then turned sharply and headed for the door. He had one foot over the threshold before he paused, something beyond the door making him change his mind. Dobey stood and leaned to the side so that he could see around the frame.

Huggy! That was what the other men called him. Huggy - Tony was the kid's real name. Antonio Washington - but none of the ways of shortening the kid's name seemed to fit him as much as Huggy did. Sergeant Washington had been inches from the door ready to knock when Sergeant Starsky decided to take his leave and the two were nose to nose for a few breaths before Starsky rocked back onto the foot still in the office.

Neither gave ground, but Starsky was the first to make a little breathing room. Dobey put that little nugget of an observation away in the back of his mind and barked, "Sergeant Starsky you were not dismissed. Sergeant Washington I'll be with you momentarily."

Huggy gave a bobbing shrug, the kid's natural good humor coming out despite the unintended affront. Starsky's back stiffened and he turned, staying by the door until it had closed.

"If you're going to turn me down, Captain Dobey, I will no longer be enlisted in the United States Army. And I don't plan to stand on ceremony unless I'm being paid to do it…. _sir_."

"You're in _my_ army until I tell you otherwise, Sergeant. Sit your ass down and shut your mouth until I ask you to open it again." Dobey barked, his tone absolute.

Starsky responded with a tightening of the jaw that appeared as a bubble either side of his neck. Then he returned to the chair and stood in front of it, waiting.

"Your record speaks for itself in all areas but one, sergeant. And it is that area that I want to have outlined in finite detail. I want to know absolutely everything that occupied you from the night of April the 17th until May 1st. You can give that to me in writing or you can deliver it here, and now, verbally. Which would you prefer?"

For a long moment Starsky seemed stunned by the request. When he recovered it was to ask, "Permission to speak freely."

"Within reason, granted." Dobey said, the amendment something he had learned to use long ago with the younger, more talkative NCOs.

"Don't you have other appointments, sir?"

"I do, Sergeant." Dobey said with a slight smile. "If I can trust you to make it from here to the NCO barracks without blowing anything up, or causing anyone else to doubt your loyalty, we can continue this in the morning."

The smirk that pursed the sergeant's lips was almost shy. He'd taken the burn and accepted it as deserving, showing a strong character. And a sense of humor. Dobey liked the kid, despite himself. "I think I can handle that, sir." Starsky said, saluted and left the room.


	2. Chapter 1

Chapter 1

It took a day longer than Dobey would have liked to return to Sergeant Starsky's tale. In the end the extra day gave Dobey time to send out a few inquiries. Most, as usual, were ignored. But one very important one was answered, and the response was not only prompt, but helpful.

When Starsky did come back through his door he seemed to be brimming with confidence and zeal. The day in interim had supplied the sergeant with time to settle in, take a physical and quickly establish himself as a mid-rate, middleweight boxer. Some of the men liked him. Some of them deeply resented his being there. The rest avoided him cautiously, while spreading ever more deviant rumors about him through the barracks. In short, Starsky was the new guy.

Clearly his status as new guy hadn't worked against him. Starsky sat when invited and started straight into the story without preamble, once more gushing about the beauty of this woman Louisa, adding a bit of braggadocio about his intent to woo her, were it not for this Italian soldier that she pined for. Dobey let him talk, his fingers playing over the edge of a memo that all but proved Starsky a liar. He waited for something that the soldier said to sound like truth, recognized how he brushed past the inconvenient realities of the situation and moved onto the meat of the story that he might have taken weeks, or mere hours, to fabricate. He considered letting him continue on. It was the knock on the door that convinced him otherwise. A breathless female ensign stood in the cracked door, her eyes wide with alarm.

Dobey coming to his feet cut off the soldier mid-sentence and they both looked to the young woman as she closed the door behind her, saluted, then handed a telegram to Captain Dobey. Dobey felt Starsky's eyes on him as his brows went up, scanning the note then reading it in detail. Both times through, the message was unchanged.

An Italian prisoner claiming to have detailed knowledge that would lead to success in the eastern campaign had made a bargain to be transferred from the POW camp in New Hampshire to their base in North Carolina. He had insisted that he be brought to a black army regiment, or he wouldn't talk. Dobey wanted to know what twisted advertising poster campaign had led to so many white boys demanding to join up with buffalo soldiers. He hadn't expected to be chased out of the neighborhood by white people while still in the army, in the middle of a war no less.

The coincidence couldn't be ignored, no matter the absurdity of it, and Dobey looked to the sergeant.

"Come with me, Starsky." He said finally, carefully laying the telegram flat on his desk. He'd want to redact and save that for his scrapbook if and when the war finally ended. The two men left the office, wove their way through desks and chairs and finally placed their caps over their heads as they stepped into the stifling late summer heat.

A bus sat wheezing a hundred feet from the door, the windows all down, and the driver standing with stained pits by the red hot bonnet. North Carolina's heat could be abusive to machines, any machines. That might have been an excuse for why their part of the base had been supplied with the oldest and most rundown that the army had to offer. If Dobey had been foolish and naive, it might have been.

This bus looked like a chariot compared to the jeeps and trucks his men toiled over everyday. Thankfully those were only training vehicles and the soldiers he had sent ahead into combat worked on the best that American soil had to offer. It was one of the few things that made it possible for Dobey to sleep at night. The pale, bruised, ragged prisoner in a tattered Eye-Tie uniform however...that was likely to give him heartburn for a while. The man was a mess.

His eyes, nose and mouth were rimmed with red puffy skin, and his hair had been shorn too close to the skull. That might have been a measure to rid him of lice, or perhaps Italy's idea of a buzz cut, but it made the man look sickly. His hair was blonde, so blonde it was like fine corn silk atop his sunburned skull. He didn't have the cap for his uniform, that or he had been forced to take it off. The rest of the rags he wore hung on his frame, and there was a deep bruise under his left eye puffing the lower lid even more, to twice it's normal size.

Dobey tore his eyes away from the prisoner and caught the pale fury coming from Sergeant Starsky. At first he thought the man was responding to the injustice of whatever beating the prisoner had sustained. Then Dobey looked back and saw that the prisoner's roving eyes had vectored in on Starsky's and stayed there. Dobey watched a single quiet nod go from one man to the other, then turned his gaze back in time to watch the blonde prisoner's knees buckle.

The driver tried to reach the man in time, hands slapping at the prisoner's shackled wrists, but the blonde was sweat slicked and slammed into the dust. Starsky was moving before Dobey could order him to stop. The sergeant was in the dust, the prisoner's head cradled over his thighs, hanging over him to provide a scant shadow of shade. Dobey decided to use his breath to order the driver to get a medic, instead of wasting it on ordering Starsky away from the man.

While the men around him scrambled to comply Dobey approached the two and knelt to open the uniform coat. There was no shirt underneath and bruises indicated even more damage to the man's torso.

"Jesus, Ken. What did they do to ya?" Starsky breathed.

There was no response from the prisoner, but when Dobey looked down the blonde's eyes were open. Pale blue looked up and out, and if Dobey didn't know better, he'd have sworn the prisoner was German, and not Italian. He also knew what little love the Italians had for the Germans, especially as they were slowly regaining their own country.

If the boy really was German, and it was the Italians that had caught him in uniform, the bruising would make sense. But according to the telegram, Tenente Kenneth Hutchison had been held in the US for the past two weeks. The same amount of time that Sergeant Starsky had been home.

That combined with the memo he'd gotten from Sergeant Harrison made Starsky's story slip all the further. The man was lying but it didn't make sense that he should.

Louisa might have been beautiful. Harrison, in fact, had given credit where it was due and agreed that Louisa might have been a model in her time. But she was forty-one when Starsky and Harrison met her in London. Not the twenty-something beauty Starsky passed her off as.

Harrison had also confirmed that it was clear Louisa loved the man in the photo, but they weren't boyfriend and girlfriend. And the photo had been all Louisa had of the man still stuck in Italy. The photo had shown a man in uniform, yes, but not the uniform the Germans demanded Italian soldiers representing the Third Reich wear. It had been an old uniform. The man had been smiling, and eager, almost as if he had just finished some form of Eye-Tie boot camp.

Harrison had been stateside when their unit liberated the Eye-Tie camp, so he hadn't been one of the witnesses to Starsky's supposed betrayal. All he could say was that Louisa might have been a beauty, but she was old enough to have been Starsky's mother.

Now, watching Starsky buzz around the unconscious prisoner intently, nearly underfoot, Dobey could see why he had been accused of betrayal. The American sergeant cared far too much about this supposed stranger.

"Sergeant." Dobey shouted halting Starsky before he could climb onto the jeep carrying the prisoner to the infirmary. "You owe me an explanation." Dobey barked. He watched the indecision on the young man's face. Like a dog being pulled between two masters. Starsky stood rooted long enough to watch the jeep pull away, spitting dust at his shoes.

Dobey remained quiet until Starsky stood a few feet in front of him, still looking after the fading jeep. "You know that young man."

Starsky's eyes met his, startled, scrambling to remember the lie. He opened his mouth to deny it, or to fabricate a new explanation but Dobey cut him off.

"I talked to Harrison. He sent me a description of Louisa. He seemed to think that her gray hair and wrinkles didn't quite jive with your "pin-up model"."

The quiet smirk returned and Starsky's hands rested on his hips as he looked to his dust caked shoes. He'd shined them only that morning. Now they were grimy, the dust soaking into the still wet, inky black polish.

"I don't know if you noticed, but not one of the men in this compound seemed quite as concerned about that enemy soldier as you did just now." Dobey continued, pointing at the still lingering uniform clad men dotting the clearing.

"You have one more opportunity to tell me the truth, Sergeant, before I throw your ass into confinement. You can sit out the war in a cell adjacent to your buddy there, if that's what your goal has been all along. Or you can tell me the truth. And make something better out of this mess."

* * *

"This is the sort of thing that gets a guy killed." Starsky said, squirming already in his chair. "You're sure you want to hear this? I mean...once you know...everything...it can't help your career."

Dobey glanced around his drab office, noting the lack of windows, the tattered furniture, the barebones rug. "I don't see my career going places at the moment, Sergeant, get to it."

Starsky squirmed a bit more then asked. "Do you have an siblings, Captain? Are your mother and father still alive?"

Dobey didn't answer. He knew the question wasn't really directed at him and it sounded rehearsed enough that he realized Starsky had been planning all along to tell the truth. Maybe not here and now, but he had planned to let it be known sometime.

"My father died a year before I enlisted. I never knew my mother. I had pictures of her, and I was told once by an uncle that she had run away to Europe. But...Europe is like Mars to somebody in the Bronx. Just getting out of the burrough can be a major miracle sometimes. The army was my way out, you know. My father was a cop, and there was no way in hell I was gonna go that route. I wanted to join the French legion but my pop got sick and…" Starsky shrugged and looked to the fraying carpet.

"I didn't join just to get to Europe. I joined cause...what the hell else was I gonna do. I had friends in Pearl Harbour. I wanted a piece of it, but they sent me east instead of west. I got to England. I was supposed to parachute into Italy in about a month and the place to train was right there in London. We had plenty of down time and I started thinking about what my uncle had said once and…"

"And you went to find your mother."

Starsky shrugged and looked down to the cap that he had kept in his hands after returning inside. "Yeah...yes, sir. I started asking around. I got a telegram to my uncle and he told me where she had been the last time my pop heard from her. I started there and...my mother's name is Lila. A fella told me there was a woman named Louisa working down at a pub on the west end. Told me what she looked like and how long she'd been there. It was a long shot. It was crazy to think it might be her. Harrison said I should go. He came with me and we hit up a few other pubs before we got to that one. Drinking our courage."

"Was it her?" Dobey asked.

Starsky shrugged, his voice dropping in enthusiasm and volume. "Maybe. She didn't know me. She didn't want to talk to me after she served us our pints. It took goin' there for three nights straight to get her to open up and even then she was...hard, you know? She'd been through everything, even before the bombings and her losing her country. She wouldn't admit to being Lila. She said she was Louisa and that she didn't know me, but...if I was an American soldier and if I was going to the front would I make her a promise."

"To look out for her son?" Dobey guessed.

Starsky's face flushed and his head tilted. "More than that. To bring him back to England. I mean...I said no, of course. How could I even imagine making such a promise. I couldn't... and it broke her heart when I said no. She gave me this picture of this kid, fresh out of training. She insisted that I keep it and I thought...suppose I die, you know? Suppose I end up cracked up in a tree or something and this lady never sees her picture again, she never sees her son again.

So I went back. I tried to give the picture to her, but she wouldn't have it. I happened to have an old photo of my parents. It was taken a long time ago and you can't see my mother's face really because it's so faded, but I brought it back our last night in London."

Starsky had leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees. He turned his cap inside out a dozen times, his fingers never still while he talked. Blue eyes rose, his forehead wrinkled and the shocks of dark hair splashed over his irises before he said, "I showed her the picture and for just a couple of seconds I could'a sworn she knew my father. It was like her heart skipped a beat. I could see it. I could feel it. Then she gave the picture back. Shook her head at me like she was terrified to admit it."

The eyes dropped down to the front of Dobey's desk.

"So I had these two pictures. One was the guy in the uniform, and the other one was the woman I was always told was my mother. I put those pictures in a little wallet and held it close to my heart when I parachuted into Italy for the first time. When I didn't crack up, when I didn't die, when I finished my mission was sent back to London for a bit of leave I tried to find Louisa. To give her that picture back. Tell her I couldn't find her kid. She wasn't there."

The captain waited, content to let the sergeant continue at his own pace. The real story had so much more weight to it. So many more shades of gray than the lie. He had the feeling there would be more than could be covered in one afternoon, but he didn't have any plans.

"The bartender said that she had just stopped showing up, and he didn't have the time to worry about some Ite bitch…"

"Tell me about the POW camp."

"I volunteered for that. I wasn't expecting to find this guy there. I wasn't...It was a cake job, you know. Go in and stand guard for a few weeks while American and British prisoners were repatriated. It was a change of pace, and some of the guys had talked about the ladies waiting in the nearby town. You know, young, without their men for the longest time, looking to go to the beautiful land of opportunity called America. It seemed like the place to be and still get paid.

We went in at the very end of winter. It was still cool but the days would heat up fast. The guys in those camps...even the Italian guards they were in bad shape. Food had been scarce and the local people wanted nothing to do with the Germans especially. A lot of the Germans that were listed on the rosters...we couldn't find 'em. And there were rumors going around that the locals had hung them all, then cut up their bodies and buried them in the forest.

That kinda hate...you can't understand it until you've seen it."

Dobey met his eyes and realized just how cold his body had become. That kind of hate. He knew it. He'd seen it in casual glances from men his own age, growing up in the slums of Los Angeles. He'd seen it in the faces of white people that had never lived around anyone but other white people, suddenly fearing for their lives because someone a shade or two darker could afford the house down the way. That kind of hate was synonymous with fear and the two worked together to create divides where none should exist.

He'd seen that kinda hate in the face of a white sergeant, the man who long ago had been in charge of training Dobey. The man seemed to get sadistic glee out of berating his men, and used every slur in the book to make sure the African American recruits knew how little he thought of them, purely because of their heritage. Yet the fastest runner on the base was in Dobey's training unit. The fastest to complete the obstacle course too, and the best sharp shooter.

"I've seen it." Dobey said, suddenly aware that he had been grinding his teeth.

When he met Starsky's eyes he was startled at the look on his face. It reflected the blood-deep rage that must have been apparent on his own, and for a moment he felt certain that this New York born and bred white boy had been through the same life. That he knew what it was to be hated for what you were, and what your father was, and what your grandfather was. To be unable to leave it all behind because there was no way to reinvent his genetic makeup.

The story had come to a grinding halt and Dobey had to take a few deep breaths to get back on even ground. The sergeant seemed to follow his lead and they both sat breathing evenly until the phone rang, startling them both.

"Captain Dobey."

"Captain, we need you down at the infirmary."

Dobey sat up, then leaned forward at the sound of strained alarm in the voice of his chief medical officer. "What is it?"

"The prisoner they just brought in...the POW transfer. He's...he is dying sir. He's asking to talk to that new man. Starsky. And he's...he's asking in German, sir."


End file.
